One of the main goals of scientists is to communicate their findings. They are able to do this by publishing papers of their work. Stacy is currently spending lots of time editing and preparing her paper to be published!

The lab recently attended the 45th annual Benthic Ecology Meeting located in Portland, Maine. This meeting occurs yearly allowing scientists to exchange information on benthic ecosystems and to encourage the next generation of benthic biologists.

Stacy presented an oral presentation on her newly published paper Unconscious uncoupling: invasion of novel habitats disrupts haploid-diploid life cycles.

Paige and Sarah presented their research at the poster session. Paige's poster was titled Are introduced populations of the seaweed ​Gracilaria​​ vermiculophylla ​more resistant to herbivores than native populations? A test of post ­invasion adaptation.

Sarah presented The Role of Heat Tolerance in the Invasive Success of the Red Seaweed ​Gracilaria vermiculophylla

The whole Sotka Lab is on spring break this week. All except for Glauco! Glauco has been busy redesigning his experiment methodology. Sometimes scientists will start an experiment, and it does not always turn out accordingly. So what do they do? They don't give up, they try again! Glauco set up a feeding assay for herbivores using an artificial food source. The herbivores did not eat the fake food, so he will be redesigning the same experiment using the real deal... seaweed!

Microscopes can be a big part of daily life in an ecology lab. In this photo, Liz is using a microscope to identify organisms that were collected along with Gracilaria. They can be described as epifauna. Epifauna are organisms that live on a particular substrate. In this case, these animals were all using Gracilaria as their home. One organism Liz is finding a lot of, are amphipods. Click here to see an amphipod species often found in South Carolina.

Last week the Science Spotlight crew stopped by the lab and heard that many Gracilaria specimens being cultured in the wetlab had died off.One idea is that they received too much light. Huh? It's true, folks. Too much light, especially in an artificial environment can be bad for algae or plants.

Yesterday we caught up with Ben, who was preparing to start another temperature assay. But what really caught our eye were the tubes and trays! Tips cut off Gracilaria plants are first placed in these labeled, colored tubes. It is these colored tubes that are placed in the water bath that is set to a certain temperature- the temperature Ben is experimenting with (food for thought: is temperature the dependent or independent variable?). After the water bath, tips are placed in these clear trays and monitored for bleaching over 8 days.

Remember the scientific method? Well... that part about analysis can be a big portion of what a scientist does after running an assay, or experiment. Yesterday we caught up with Stacey in her and Glauco's office. Boy! She sure was hard at work at her computer! When asked what she was up to, with a wry smile she answered, "Data analysis. It can be exciting, sometimes not so exciting." Glauco, also at his desk, answered he was indeed busy with his experiments this week.

The Science Spotlight team stopped by the Sotka lab today and found Sarah and Paige who had just finished cleaning up in the wetlab. It turns out, sometimes things in science don't always go as planned- and a lot of times there isn't a plan, because you just don't know. In this case, raising and growing Gracilaria in a lab meant that at some point, some of these specimens might "kick the bucket", quite literally. Much of the Gracilaria residing in the wetlab had died off and as of yesterday, the Sotka lab was down from 48 buckets housing algae to 22. This is neither a positive or a negative necessarily, just the natural flow of events in a lab over time as experiments and research goes on. Despite the death of some specimens, Sarah is wrapping up one last experiment with the Gracilaria collected in Japan.

Follow up with our blog this week as we discuss a potential theory for the wetlab Gracilaria mortality!

Whew! The lab sure is BUSY! This past Monday the whole lab got together to work on "tip isolation". This means they were removing the "tips" (ends) of Gracilaria they had grown or collected for "assaying". The simplest definition of an assay is a kind of experimental method. Sarah let us know that it took 4 people 3 hours of nonstop work to complete this task. Wow! That is 12 man hours! We also met Glauco Machado, a visiting scientist from Brazil working with Dr. Sotka. What a day!